IntroductionMy personal childhood experiences with language and literacy have been extremely diverse, since my life has encompassed a life of extreme wealth in Somalia, and then poverty and severe hardship after emigration to a lower-middle class neighborhood in the United Kingdom. Taken together, my childhood could be said to contain nearly every element of varying social contexts. Ultimately, however, I would conclude that while my social context for family life is expressed most clearly in Davin's Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, my strongest context for learning and literacy was gained in the United Kingdom schools that I attended after our family's emigration from Somalia.
Early childhood and social context
I was born in Somalia in 1981. The national infrastructure within Somalia remains undeveloped in many areas. Governmental administration, and systems for the advancement of health, technology, and agriculture are all lacking. Public infrastructure, as it is exists in most western nations, is almost entirely absent. Luckily for me, my years as a very young child Somalia were comfortable and secure, since my father was extremely wealthy. My parents, my five siblings and I lived in a large household which was serviced by hired help, and was situated on a large estate. Life in Somalia was very comfortable, and secure. While this was unusual in a country which had not experienced anything like the level of political development that exists in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States, this wealth meant that my father, and our family, possessed an unusual amount of power. My father could obtain anything he wanted, and although law and military power was always the ultimate force within Somalia, monetary power was the underlying controlling element of all things.
My family was well-known because of our wealth. People who recognized us in the smaller towns and larger cities granted us special treatment, since in Somalia, people with money were both respected and feared. Wealthy individuals and their families could "get away" with a lot more than the average person (and especially more than the average poor person, who was often mistreated), and they could also use their money as leverage to obtain special favors. Law enforcement could often be persuaded, or bribed if necessary, in cases where wealthy people fell into legal problems. For example, one of my childhood friends, whose family was also wealthy, encountered trouble with the shopkeepers in town due to his actions. Just when he was about to get into serious trouble with the shopkeepers as well as the law, his father arrived the legal charges against him were dropped. Had a poor child gotten into such a predicament, he would have likely been punished at the scene or in another facility.
This privileged existence ended abruptly when I was nine, and I emigrated to the United Kingdom with my siblings and mother, but without my father, and thus without the wealth. While certain elements of my childhood may seem glamorous due to our comfortable living conditions in Somalia, this changed suddenly, in as complete a way as it is possible for anyone to imagine. It was my mother's choice to bring myself and my siblings to live in the United Kingdom. Our lifestyle changed dramatically as we went from having housekeepers and a mansion, to surviving on government assistance while being crammed into small accommodations. Once the shift from my father's authority to my mother's took place, the lifestyle of my siblings and myself changed drastically. My mother was extremely strict, while my father had been more generous and open minded with us (as his mind was typically preoccupied with political affairs and business.) This change, combined with a severely reduced standard of living, speaking a different language, and being surrounded by a culture with a very different mentality came as quite a shock to me at that age. My mother would become my lifelong role model, while my experiences in school, learning to speak, read and write in English, were most formative for learning and literacy.
Learning and Literacy in English
As Brooker states, upon arriving in school in the United Kingdom, learning to acquire the social capital of appropriate classroom behavior was the most pressing issue for me, and not learning (Brooker 109). Even more than the need to learn English as quickly as possible, I quickly realized that accommodating the social requirements of school was more important than actual academic achievement. Until I found ways to master my behavior in class and with my peers, in order to fit in comfortably, learning occupied a less important place in my mind. In the early days, going to school each morning meant wondering how to avoid embarrassment, frustration, and racial harassment as well.
While my teachers encouraged my mother to visit the school in order to observe ways to encourage us in our schoolwork at home, like many immigrant mothers who were not comfortable with the schools in the new country, she trusted that the professional educators at school knew what was best in terms of learning, and left matters to their discretion (Brooker 116) (Tizard 6). I did experience bullying and teasing from the other children at my school. While I found the British people to be generally kind and racially tolerant, my classmates were not so kind. As Brooker explains, a student such as myself, who changes countries, cultures, and language abruptly, experiences a radical discontinuity. For me, "becoming a pupil meant learning to be someone different altogether" (Brooker 111).
Fortunately, the school that I attended was a participant in the National Oracy Project, which operated in British schools throughout the years 1987-1993 (Corden 5). This program was founded on the recognition that talking, reading and writing are mutually enriching, and that all three skills should be built at the same time within the learning environment. This was especially true for me and other students like myself, who were English language learners upon our entry into the British educational system.
The National Oracy Project educational model encouraged "exploratory talking"; and in my case, this meant grappling with meaning while attempting to speak English aloud, as a means of developing fluency in English speaking, as well as in reading and writing (Corden 5). Since the Project model allowed for unrehearsed, untidy speech as a critical component of the process of clarifying language meaning, exploratory talking proved beneficial.
Yet despite my discomfort with the social aspect of attending British schools, and the radical changes in my life in general, I began to learn, first to speak English, and then to read and write in it as well. While my teachers were attentive, and I found comfort among the other students who were also English learners, I learned quickly in part because I was still young, and learning was easy: "Complex language is universal because children actually reinvent it, generation after generation - not because they are taught, not because it is useful to them, but because they just can't help it (Pinker 20). As I began to gain fluency, I felt pride in my new ability, in part because it raised my value in the eyes of my family.
During the early stages of learning to speak English, I used a pattern of following the eye gaze direction of English speakers as an initial indicator for the names of objects. This corresponds to Bloom's description of the way that an infant will follow the mother's gaze as it is directed toward an object during language acquisition (Bloom 46). Bloom notes that once children begin to build a range of vocabulary, they start slowly and then gradually increase the speed and rate of acquisition (Bloom 46). This was my experience, and the experience of my fellow English learners.
Bloom notes that the average six-year-old knows about 10,000 words (Bloom 46). At the age of nine, I spoke Somali but no English; this felt like an enormous disadvantage at the beginning; nevertheless, I began to acquire a broad range of words within the first few months of attending school. As I learned to read in English, my vocabulary expanded exponentially; as Bloom states, "literacy exposes children to more words, and it is likely that the gargantuan vocabularies of some English speakers (well over 100,000 words) could not occur without the ability to read. Bloom even speculates that more than 100,000 words would not exist without the ability to read (Bloom 47).
In the early stages of learning to speak English, I would assume, when learning a word that seemed to name an object, that the word applied to the entire object, and not a part of it. For example, the arm of a chair was assumed at first by me to be the word for the entire chair itself. This correlates with Chiat's observance of the way that children first learn to label objects (Chiat 20). I experienced difficulty much of the time when learning new vocabulary with memory storing of sound patterns, and also with mapping sound patterns into their correct meanings, which Chiat describes also (Chiat 36). As Chiat notes regarding the way that children learn language, "Children are not blank screens registering every feature of the scenes which pass them by. They constantly filter the myriad stimuli they receive, attending to certain aspects rather than others. This filtering process leads them to make sense of what goes on around them; it also leads them to respond and interact with their environment in ways which make sense to others" (Chiat 20).
Learning to read was exciting, since it opened up entire worlds to me that I had not known existed; I love to read even to this day. My intense curiosity about the new world in which I lived, and the larger world, could only be satisfied through books. Our life in a crowded living space was difficult in ways that I could never have imagined during the early years in Somalia. The world of school was not always kind, or even understandable. Yet in books, life began to make sense in a way that the life outside did not; more, books allowed me to ask questions quietly, and then wonder if answers might be found. If no answer was found, that was not a problem; just the process of articulating the question was a comfort. As Wolf describes the process of reading: "Reading is a neuronally and intellectually circuitous act, enriched as much as possible by the unpredictable indirections of a reader's preferences and thoughts, as from the direct message to the eye from the text" (Wolf 16).
Since I learned English much more rapidly than my mother, I assumed the duties of assisting her when she needed to communicate in English with the world outside the community of other Somali immigrants who lived near us, and who became our comrades. This was a role reversal for me, since in Somalia I would never have needed to help a parent to manage daily life. Our family had been powerful there, and as such, the path of our daily life was smoothed for us, in every way. In the United Kingdom, and in large part due to our new state of poverty, struggle became a familiar feature of our family life. When going out with my mother, shopkeepers would sometimes assume that we could not understand English, and would occasionally express unkind sentiments toward our immigrant status, and racial status. I would allow them to speak a little, while they assumed that we could not understand. Then I would begin speaking with them in English, and enjoy the look of discomfort on their faces as they realized that I had understood everything they were saying about us. This is evidently a rather common experience for some immigrants who have succeeded in learning English (Cunningham 6).
Emigration from Somalia brought an abrupt end to one life for our family, and catapulted us into an unfamiliar culture and way of life. Learning English was more difficult for me than perhaps other immigrant children, who speak a native language that is based on Latin, such as German, Spanish or French. My situation with regard to language and literacy was similar to someone whose native language is Chinese, or Russian, with an alphabet and verbal soundings that are completely removed from English.
Yet I learned, and was fortunate to have arrived in the United Kingdom well before my teen years. I had time to adjust to western life patterns before reaching adulthood. The capacity of a child to learn a new vocabulary, in written, spoken, and text, still amazes me today, long after it was my own experience. I have enjoyed the process of studying, through this class, exactly how it occurs.
ReferencesDavin, A. (1996) Growing up poor: home, school and street in London. 1870-1914. London: Rivers Oram.
Brooker, P. (2002) Starting school; young children learning cultures. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Tizard, B. (2003) Young Children Learning. Wiley-Blackwell; 2 edition.
Corden, R. (2000) Literacy and Learning Through Talk: Strategies for the Primary Classroom. Open University Press.
Pinker, S. (2007) The Language Instinct. Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
Bloom, P. (2000) How Children Learn the Meanings of Words (Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change.) MIT Press.
Chiat, S. (2000) Understanding children with language problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wolf, M. (2007) Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Harper: 1 edition.
Cunningham, U. (2111) Growing up with two languages: a Practical Guide. London: Routledge: 3rd edition.
